TheRealConcertKing YouTube channel has uploaded video of CYNIC‘s June 14 concert at Brick By Brick in San Diego, California. Check out the clips below.
CYNIC‘s “Focus And Presence” North American tour with fellow progressive metal pioneers ATHEIST, which kicked off on June 10 in Austin, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Paul Masvidal-fronted act’s debut album, “Focus”. CYNIC is performing the seminal LP in its entirety while also paying homage to late members Sean Reinert and Sean Malone.
Later in the year, CYNIC will perform at the illustrious ProgPower USA festival on September 6 in Atlanta, Georgia.
CYNIC‘s touring lineup features Masvidal on vocals and guitars, Max Phelps (EXIST, DEATH TO ALL) on additional guitars and vocals, Brandon Giffin (THE FACELESS, THE ZENITH PASSAGE) on bass, Matt Lynch (NOVA COLLECTIVE, INTRONAUT) on drums and percussion, and Zeke Kaplan on the keyboard. Lynch has been drumming with CYNIC since 2015 and appeared on the band’s latest full-length, “Ascension Codes”, as well as the 2018 single “Humanoid”. Additionally, Phelps, having also appeared on “Ascension Codes”, and Giffin have previously toured with CYNIC during the band’s “Carbon Based Anatomy” and “Kindly Bent To Free Us” tours.
Released in 1993, “Focus” is a certified classic. Although that era ended with transformation into the short-lived PORTAL, and then a further splinter toward AEON SPOKE, CYNIC‘s reunion-era has found them embraced in a way that proves how ahead of the times they were in the ’90s. Through monuments such as the “Traced In Air” (2008) and “Kindly Bent To Free Us” (2014) albums, the “Carbon-Based Anatomy” and “Re-Traced” EPs, and a surprising rebirth with the “Humanoid” single of 2018, the CYNIC legacy remains untarnished.
The year 2020 will go down in history as a tremendously difficult time for the global human population. For the CYNIC family, the struggle was not restricted to a pandemic. It was two utterly senseless losses that threw the band’s immediate concerns into the background: the premature deaths of drummer Sean Reinert in January, at age 48, and bassist Sean Malone in December, at age 50, were shocking and unthinkable.
Reinert, a founding CYNIC member since formation in 1988, was highly influential to a multitude of young drummers. His work on “Focus” and DEATH‘s watershed 1991 album “Human” found him sculpting extreme technical metal with a jazz fusion-inspired approach. Now taken for granted, that approach to the instrument and the genre was undoubtedly pioneered in large part by Reinert. Though parting with CYNIC in 2015, his imprint on CYNIC is inescapable.
The death of Sean Malone dealt another horrible layer of tragedy to CYNIC‘s 2020. In his many years with the band, Malone‘s virtuoso playing meshed intuitively with Reinert‘s. Together they formed a nucleus of kinetic, highly capable rhythmic dexterity that fueled CYNIC‘s celestial aims.